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Category Archives: Conferences

Quite simply put the SharePoint Evolution Conference in London is THE best SharePoint related conference I have ever attended. I had the opportunity to attend 2 years ago to speak and was blown away at the quality of sessions, speakers and conference experience as a whole. It’s not too huge to lose the intimate feel, yet not too small either.

This year it runs from April 15th – 17th 2013.

I have the privilege of speaking again at this years event and will be presenting two sessions. One on the process of building SharePoint and another on building cutting edge intranets built on search, metadata and taxonomy. I’ll will be posting here again with more details on each of these over the next month or two.

If you are based in Europe and have to pick one event to attend this year … I cannot recommend this event highly enough.

There are quite a few “SharePoint Conferences” around the world each year, but there is only one SPC.

I attend quite a few conferences that are SharePoint related each year and enjoy many of them. But there are only a couple I really truly look forward to. SPC is one of those. It’s just different. It’s huge, it’s a big reunion of everyone in the SharePoint industry and many friends. I am also kind of bias about this conference since I used to help run it and I am still involved in parts of it. Provoke built the MySPC attendee experience along with the companion MySPC for WP7 app.(more on that a little later).

People go to SPC for a lot of varying reasons. Some go to party, others go for the sessions, others go to network and some just go because they were told to. I go for the people. It’s the one time each year I know almost everyone I value talking to about SharePoint will be in one place at the same time.

Here are a couple of tips that I think will really help enhance your conference experience.

Picking ContentI am very selective about what sessions I go to. There are so many on at one time that you will miss out on things … so pick which ones you want to attend in person and make a like of the others to watch the videos afterwards. Instead of picking what to attend based on content alone I tend to pick based on who the speaker is first, then topic and then relevance to me. Some of the best sessions I have been to have been about topics that are not core to my skills. I learn the most of out those and broaden my horizons.

Peaking earlySPC is a marathon not a sprint. Noobs will hit the conference running and peak too early. Too many late nights out at parties to early in the week. Basically my rule of thumb to survive the week is to not hit it hard until the attendee party. No all nighters Sunday or Monday kids 🙂

Networking

I personally find wandering the expo hall and community areas talking to people a very valuable use of time. I meet all sorts of people and end up connecting with loads people. It’s really valuable to me. MySPC has a feature where you can find out who from your social networks is attending the conference and that is a good way to see who you might want to set up some time with to talk.

Jump on MySPC and head into the Favorites section. Connect up your social networks and it will find others from your networks that have done the same.

SharePintSharePint is always a highlight at SPC. It’s a great social event that shouldn’t be missed. It’s a SharePoint tradition and its in the EyeCandy sound and lounge bar from 7pm on Sunday. This is SharePoint community at its best.

Navigating while you are there.If you have a Windows Phone then MySPC for WP7 is a must have. If not then use myspc.mssharepointconference.com and it should redirect you to the mobile web experience. This way you can see your schedule, update it & check out what else is on etc…

If you are heading to the conference this year be sure to get in touch with me on twitter (@LoungeFlyZ), we can meet up and talk SharePoint.

I know a lot organizations want to jump into cloud computing, but will be living with on-prem systems for a long time to come. Its just the way its going to be for a lot of different reasons. Who knows it could be like that forever.

This session will be tailored to those who want to look at leveraging SharePoint Online and integrating it with their on-prem line of business systems and databases. It will be a dev heavy session with examples for each of the techniques I talk about. I’ll be talking a lot about SharePoint Online (obviously), Windows Azure, Service Bus, JSONP and more.

Anyway, if you are attending TechEd and are interested in this stuff I would love it if you came along!

One of my favorite social gatherings at most conferences where there are SharePoint people is the SharePint. It’s the epitome of all things good in the SharePoint community. Typically non-sponsored it is where people regardless of company, technical orientation or SharePoint prowess come and share stories and catch-up. I love meeting people I haven’t seen for a while at these things. I think its an awesome feature of the community.

WPC 2012 – the Microsoft World Wide Partner conference will be no different in Toronto this year.

The gauntlet has been thrown down by the master WPC SharePint ringleader Owen Allen